Holidays - Fiction, Other Mystery Categories, Historical Fiction

A Christmas Promise

Name: A Christmas Promise
Author: Anne Perry
ISBN: 9780345516671

by Anne Perry

Available on Bookshop Write a review

Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.

Overview

Anne Perry’s Victorian Christmas novels have attracted as many faithful readers as her two New York Times bestselling series featuring investigators Thomas Pitt and William Monk. A Christmas Promise is the seventh in Perry’s holiday series, and it will surely bring joy to this special season.

Three days before Christmas, in the freezing slums of London’s East End, thirteen-year-old Gracie Phipps encounters Minnie Maude Mudway, who is only eight, alone, and determined to find her friend Charlie.

However Charlie is no ordinary companion: He is a donkey who belonged to Minnie Maude’s Uncle Alf. Gracie is shocked to learn that only the day before, someone brutally murdered Uncle Alf and made off with his rag-and-bones cart and the beloved beast who pulled it. Now, come hell or high water, Minnie Maude means to rescue Charlie–and Gracie decides to help. But the path that Uncle Alf had taken to his death was not his regular route, and in his cart were not just the usual bits of worn silver and china but also, the children are told, a dazzling golden box. What its contents may have been no one can say, for, like Charlie and the cart, it too has vanished.

Uncertain where their four-legged friend may be, the children are drawn into an adult world far beyond their innocent imaginings. And in a shop gleaming with beautiful objects, they recruit an unexpected ally: Mr. Balthasar, who warns them that the shining prize may be a Pandora’s box of evil.

Set in the Victorian world where Anne Perry reigns supreme, A Christmas Promise culminates in a radiant finale that will remain with you long after the final page is turned.

From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author, Anne Perry

Anne Perry is the bestselling author of six earlier holiday novels–A Christmas Grace, A Christmas Journey, A Christmas Visitor, A Christmas Guest, A Christmas Secret, and A Christmas Beginning–as well as the William Monk series and the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series set in Victorian England, and five World War I novels. Anne Perry lives in Scotland.

From the Hardcover edition.

Biography

Born in London in October 1938, Anne Perry was plagued with health problems as a young child. So severe were her illnesses that at age eight she was sent to the Bahamas to live with family friends in the hopes that the warmer climate would improve her health. She returned to her family as a young teenager, but sickness and frequent moves had interrupted her formal education to the extent that she was finally forced to leave school altogether. With the encouragement of her supportive parents, she was able to "fill in the gaps" with voracious reading, and her lack of formal schooling has never held her back.

Although Perry held down many jobs—working at various times as a retail clerk, stewardess, limousine dispatcher, and insurance underwriter—the only thing she ever seriously wanted to do in life was to write. (In her '20s, she started putting together the first draft of Tathea, a fantasy that would not see print until 1999.) At the suggestion of her stepfather, she began writing mysteries set in Victorian London; and in 1979, one of her manuscripts was accepted for publication. The book was The Cater Street Hangman, an ingenious crime novel that introduced a clever, extremely untidy police inspector named Thomas Pitt. In this way an intriguing mystery series was born…along with a successful writing career.

In addition to the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt novels, Perry crafts darker, more layered Victorian mysteries around the character of London police detective William Monk, whose memory has been impaired by a coach accident. (Monk debuted in 1990's The Face of a Stranger.) She also writes historical novels set during the First World War (No Graves as Yet, Shoulder the Sky, etc.) and holiday-themed mysteries (A Christmas Journey, A Christmas Secret, etc), and her short stories have been included in several anthologies.

Good To Know

Some fun and fascinating outtakes from our interview with Anne Perry:

The first time I made any money telling a story I was four and a half years old—golden hair, blue eyes, a pink smocked dress, and neat little socks and shoes. I walked home from school (it was safe then) with my lunchtime sixpence unspent. A large boy, perhaps 12 or 13, stopped me. He was carrying a stick and threatened to hit me if I didn't give him my sixpence. I told him a long, sad story about how poor we were—no food at home, not even enough money for shoes! He gave me his half crown—five times sixpence! It's appalling! I didn't think of it as lying, just escaping with my sixpence. How on earth he could have believed me I have no idea. Perhaps that is the knack of a good story—let your imagination go wild, pile on the emotions—believe it yourself, evidence to the contrary be damned. I am not really proud of that particular example!

I used to live next door to people who had a tame dove. They had rescued it when it broke its wing. The wing healed, but it never learned to fly again. I used to walk a mile or so around the village with the dove. Its little legs were only an inch or two long, so it got tired, then it would ride on my head. Naturally I talked to it. It was a very nice bird. I got some funny looks. Strangers even asked me if I knew there was a bird on my head! Who the heck did they think I was talking to? Of course I knew there was a bird on my head. I'm not stupid—just a writer, and entitled to be a little different. I'm also English, so that gives me a second excuse!

On the other hand I'm not totally scatty. I like maths, and I used to love quadratic equations. One of the most exciting things that happened to me was when someone explained non-Euclidean geometry to me, and I suddenly saw the infinite possibilities in lateral thinking! How could I have been so blind before?

Here are some things I like—and one thing I don't:

I love wild places, beech trees, bluebell woods, light on water—whether the light is sunlight, moonlight, or lamplight; and whether the water is ocean, rain, snow, river, mist, or even a puddle.

I love the setting sun in autumn over the cornstooks.

I love to eat raspberries, pink grapefruit, crusty bread dipped in olive oil.

I love gardens where you seem to walk from "room to room," with rambling roses and vines climbing into the trees and sudden vistas when you turn corners.

I love white swans and the wild geese flying overhead.

I dislike rigidity, prejudice, ill-temper, and perhaps above all, self-righteousness.

I love laughter, mercy, courage, hope. I think that probably makes me pretty much like most people. But that isn't bad.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

Publishers Weekly

While bestseller Perry doesn't offer much of a puzzle in her seventh Christmas-themed Victorian historical (after 2008's A Christmas Grace), she does a highly credible job of evoking Dickens, especially in the opening scenes set in Whitechapel. As the 1883 holiday season nears in London's East End, 13-year-old Gracie Phipps, a supporting character in Perry's Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series (Buckingham Palace Gardens, etc.), encounters a woebegone younger child, Minnie Maude Mudway, on the mean streets of her neighborhood. Minnie is looking for a missing donkey, Charlie, which belonged to her beloved uncle Alf. The animal disappeared the day before, around the same time Alf, a bone-and-rag dealer, was killed. The two girls turn detective in an effort to find Charlie as well as the truth about how Alf died. Mr. Balthasar, a shopkeeper who assists in the sleuthing, lends an appealing Holmesian touch. (Nov.)

Library Journal

Mystery author Perry returns with the seventh annual Victorian Christmas offering (after A Christmas Grace). Minnie and Gracie are working on the mystery of a missing donkey. Oh, and Minnie's uncle has just been murdered, so they set off to solve that crime as well. Short and sweet, for mystery collections where the previous Perry Christmas offerings have done well. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/09; library marketing.]